Common Admission Test (CAT) servers crashed across all centres in India on Saturday. Nearly 250,000 students appeared for the test. The scores of this test will determine a student’s admission to a management institute, including the prestigious Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs).

Such a critical test having wide arena career transformation for lakhs of students could have been built on a sustainable technology driven platform. May be if the systems are good still if the non functional aspects have not been tested like performance, load etc properly errors could cost more like what happen now. A proper testing on time could have been saved a lot of money for the authorities now.

A country like India where we are rapidly on the spree of developments with tremendous resources around cannot go just for namesake of IT implementation In all public systems; Developed nations like US, UK, Singapore (to name some of them and not intentionally) have bought a lot of coordinated efforts in bringing the systems online to ease the process and it works out well as planned (in the back end most of the public systems have hands of Indian minds); Our MNC’s proclaim many new project acquisitions (to show in billing and net worth businesses) can help local Gov: / public systems to be properly done even for a localised billing rates (though they cannot get high profit marjins still they can make some).

BTW, coming back to point a couple of points to be remembered:

A relative cost to fix a bug in varied stages of SDLC will be easily predicting the cost now the authorities have to spend to rework and redo the CAT in an all India basis.

Atleast, next time the authorities must consider testing also as a serious business and a company like Qutesys can be of great help to test the applications independently and assess the stability, durability, performance etc.

Morale: we want developing nations to be having a focussed on high quality driven automated systems in place to bring a rapid growth enabling the society and people and can count on us to help.

I remember Philips brand caption now: “Lets make things better”…..

NB: All brands names, authorities etc have taken to just make blog context understand and no intentions of promoting / demoting any one.